This morning, there was a water outage in my building. I don’t know how long it lasted: When I got up, I used the restroom, and couldn’t wash my hands. So I went for the hand sanitizer, and as I was using it, heard the toilet start to gurgle.
When I turned the water back on in the faucets, it ran brown at first. I let it run long enough that it’s now running clear again, but I don’t know if I should keep on letting it run longer than that.
This was not an expected outage. In fact, I happened to notice a couple of maintenance guys in the next apartment over, and they didn’t know anything about it.
I’m not desperate for an answer: I had two mugs worth of water in my teakettle from before the outage for drinking, and as mentioned, I have sanitizer if I need to clean up. But I’d still like an answer soon-ish.
Run it until it’s clear and a while after that. There’s no fixed answer. The discoloration is usually sediment in the lines that you’re drinking all the time in lower quantities. If you don’t use a water filter now you may want to get one just to see how dirty the water is normally, clear to the eye can still hide a lot of sediment, so if a water filter discolors rapidly you may want to use one all the time.
ETA: And you can flush the toilet a lot to clear the lines and keep the gunk out of your faucets. It can clog up simple aerators on taps.
It won’t do much good to run the water beyond when it clears up, though you might want to pulse it on/off a few times to flush the dislodged sediment in the lines. Any water pipe that isn’t routinely scrubbed out will build up a certain amount of sediment and debris, though much of the junk gets dislodged from the larger mains during a power outage.
The smaller pipes going to your taps get turned on and off all the time, and experience changes in pressure and water flow routinely from this action; they don’t build up a lot of debris that can easily be mobilized. The bigger ones usually have more constant flow and pressure, and do tend to accumulate loose debris that gets mobilized when the pressures and flows change.
Unless the water company puts out extra chlorine or other additives in response to the power outage (and they’ll tell people if it’s a big enough risk), then running the taps beyond clear isn’t giving you any benefit. If you’re especially sensitive to taste or something else it may help, but from a simple safety and esthetics point of view just run it until it’s clear then stop.
One time I recall the utility company simply closed one valve on a 12" water line to allow a quick repair. 15 minutes later the valve was opened again and the local chain restaurant tried to sue the utility company because the water turned brown for a couple hours until all the sediment was flushed out. They were loosing about $5,000 per hour because they couldn’t make and sell coffee with that water. The water was safe to drink, it just looked ugly.
1 what kind of building? one story, two story, low rise, or high rise?
When the water goes off in the main and is first restored there can be a lot of turbulence stirring up stuff on the bottom of the pipes. just flush until water is clear than you should be just as good as before.
Depending where you live before I would say you will be OK. In San Jose Ca I do not drink unfiltered water, highly filtered, that is through a RO system. I have seen what normal water does to brass valves so I advise not to drink tap water here.
An apartment block… if its taller than 5 floors, they have a water tank up top and pump mains water up to it.
So if they let the tank become nearly empty, it starts to swirl , like water in a bath…
This swirling stirs up the dregs at the bottom.
Sounds like you got the dregs… perhaps they were just testing … or cleaning … or inspecting…(inspecting to see how much dregs there was .)
When they do work on a pipe in the dirt, they throw some chlorine powder in too, so it goes on top of the dirt that leaks into the pipe… That sanitizes the water… The result is white stuff in your water.
They also coat the insides of new pipe with a carbonate … to act as precipitation site so that the carbonated in the water keep it sealed. If the water people fail to keep the carbonates in the water, they pay a lot to repair pipes…
And they had to stop selling coffee because it was brown? How did they tell?
That ‘sediment’ that colors the water brown is mostly iron – the same stuff that people pay for in supplement pills. So you could drink the brown water, and save your iron pills, You don’t even have to run it until it turns clear, unless you are fussy.
To be clear, it was a water outage, not power. So far as I can tell, the power’s been fine.
And I’m on the second floor of a two-story building, in a Cleveland suburb. Hey, our river hasn’t caught fire for 17 years, and that time was deliberate.
From what everyone’s saying, it sounds like the brown stuff was probably already in the plumbing? I had figured that there was a break in a pipe underground that was letting mud in. And I know that sometimes when something like that happens, the water department will give a warning about bacteria, and to boil the water before drinking. But if it’s already in the plumbing and just usually not agitated, I don’t imagine it’d be any more dangerous than it usually is.
When a water main breaks, no mud or dirt is going to get in so long as the main is pressurized. Once the main is shut down and depressurized for repair, the broken section of pipe is cut out and replaced. The utility company must take care to clean out any dirt or debris that may have gotten into the pipe during this process. The replacement pipe is then swabbed with bleach for a small repair, or the entire section of pipe is injected with a disinfectant for a larger repair. In either case, the affected section of pipe is thoroughly flushed by opening a hydrant before the main is put back into service.
The discoloration in your water is almost certainly a result of a hydraulic disturbance in the water main caused by hydrant use, water main valve operation, or a water main repair as described above (which requires isolating and depressurizing the main, followed by repressurization). The discoloration comes from the fine layer of iron and sediment that develops on the bottom of water mains (which are usually made of ductile iron or cast iron pipe). A hydraulic disturbance can stir up this fine sediment and temporarily discolor the water. The water is probably not harmful, but it is generally advised to not drink obviously discolored or dirty water. It is fine to use for toilet flushing, though.
The solution is to simply run your tap until the water runs clear.
You have to remember who manages a coffee shop and who actually changes the filters and makes the coffee; none of these people need any background in water distribution infrastructure or chemistry and that’s part of the problem. Of course the water is fine, but they wouldn’t know that… you get a bunch of drive-through workers panicking because they don’t know why the water’s suddenly brown, they panic the manager who starts calling the water company, they try to figure out what’s going on (only to find out that it’s nothing)… and mean while an hour’s gone by and 200 customers are waiting.
Plus, coffee’s not exactly hard to make and people have choices of where and if to buy it. You turn a profit by the little detail, product presentation, branding, etc… starting with cloudy brown water is the last thing you’d want to do. It just looks bad, and what the customers think is actually important.
OK, I’m past the point of worrying about my own situation, now. But I’ve definitely seen cases where the water company did tell people to boil the water before drinking it. What would cause that sort of situation?
Around here that happens when there’s a problem at the water treatment facility. Sometimes flooding backs up sewage, or monitoring shows high levels of contaminants.
There are several reasons why a Precautionary Boil Water Notice (PBWN) might be issued, the most obvious consisting of potable water sampling that indicates the presence of fecal coliform, E. coli, or other pathogens. This is very rare in the U.S., in my experience.
More common is a precautionary notice after a system distribution issue resulting in low water pressure, or following a water main break (for the affected area).
If a water utility uses groundwater supply wells, a PBWN would be issued if a supply well was flooded with surface water.
Finally, some water utilities occasionally have issues with copepods (which are near-microscopic crustaceans often found in surface water supplies) making it through the water filtration process. They are harmless, but present an aesthetic issue, so a PBWN might be issued if they are detected in potable water sampling.